The Orange County Register

WABASHA, Minn. — Looking for company tonight? There’s Bambi, Ginger and Pepper.

Or if your tastes go another way, pick from Fred, Simon, Aloysuis, Morris or Mickey.

Want something a little different? Try Pepsi or Arby, Tiger or Goblin.

Twelve beauties heading off to strangers’ hotel rooms for a night of fun, returning in the morning to preen for the next group eager to get them behind closed doors.

This dazzling dozen are cats, the odd in-room amenity offered at The Anderson House hotel on the banks of the Mississippi River in Wabasha, Minn.

“We have guests who reserve months ahead to make sure they get their favorite cat,” says John Hall, the fourth generation of the Anderson family to run the hotel.

Go ahead and let fly with the puns and jokes. The Anderson House staff has heard them all. Best little “cathouse”‘ in Minnesota. The place to go to get pawed. The inn place to get a warm feeling in your lap.

There are only 12 cats for 26 rooms, so walk-ins can be disappointed that they’ll go into the night without a feline companion. Allergic to cats? Better try a motel somewhere else in the Hiawatha Valley.

The Anderson House would be a quirky place even without the cats. It’s no Holiday Inn, with cookie-cutter rooms and climate-controlled quiet. The floors creak, the balky radiators rattle and the road is just outside the windows of the front rooms.

It’s what you’d expect from the oldest hotel still operating in Minnesota. The hotel opened its doors in 1856 — two years before Minnesota became a state. The inn retains much of the Victorian style of innkeeper Ida “Grandma” Anderson, who died in 1896.

Rooms have no phones, and small iron rings still hang from the walls from the days when guests were supposed to shinny down ropes tied to the rings if the hotel caught on fire. The restaurant remains retro, too, following Grandma Anderson’s recipes for ham potpie, Dutch oven steaks and Sky High Lemon Pie.

President Truman stayed at the hotel during one of his whistle-stop train campaigns. But the most memorable guest was John Dillinger. The legendary gangster arrived one day in the early 1930s in a bulletproof Packard sedan with a grim-faced entourage. They paid in advance for a week, then vanished one night — leaving the Packard behind. Hall’s grandfather wound up with the car, which stayed in the family for decades.

Dillinger came long before the cats. The rent-a-cat idea was born in 1976 when a guest from Pennsylvania stopped at The Anderson House on his way to the Mayo Clinic in nearby Rochester. He lamented how sad and lonely he was feeling. The owners, feeling sorry for him, offered to let him keep their cat in his room for the night. A tradition was born.

Today a dozen cats are “employed” at Anderson House. A painting of the original cats hangs in the hotel’s small lobby. It includes Morris, a 32-pound half-Siamese who was a favorite of visitors. The current Morris is the third to carry the name.

New cats come to the house as kittens to better acclimate them to the busy inn lifestyle. A rare exception is Tiger, who simply showed up at the back door of the kitchen one day. When workers petted her, she would purr — a natural for a job upstairs. Tiger is often given the tough assignment of families with children.

“Each of the cats has their own personality,” Hall said. “Some are docile. Some are playful. We try to match the cat with the guest.”

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page E4.